


take a break, a breath

by jestbee



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: Established Relationship, Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-21
Updated: 2018-12-21
Packaged: 2019-09-24 03:00:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,265
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17092790
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jestbee/pseuds/jestbee
Summary: The five times they almost took a break, and the one time they did





	take a break, a breath

**Author's Note:**

> This is just me processing, thank you for indulging me

The first time is towards the end of the tour. Phil's fingers knuckle-white and fisted in his own hair, eyes staring frantically at email after email. Cancelled venues, disappointed fans. A whole weight of responsibility balled up in the tense set of his jaw. 

"Take a break," Dan says. 

Phil doesn't drag his eyes away from the glow of his laptop, shaking his head even as he drops his hands from its tight grip to start typing on the keyboard. Dan lets it go with only the hint of an unhappy sigh Phil doesn't even hear.

* * *

Next is when the studio tells them the lead time on a pre-Christmas release date for the DVD.

"Seriously, Phil," Dan says, eyeing him across a hotel room. "We don't need to push it this hard. We can have a break."

Dan doesn't argue when Phil shakes his head because he's beginning to feel a sick kind of guilt, wondering if his desire for Phil to stop looking so tired is actually his own laziness just catching up to him. 

He inhales, chest inflating with dredged up determination, and emails the BBC to say they'll start the editing process only a few days after they arrive back in London.

* * *

When he finds Phil on the floor of the bathroom, nonsensical and half delirious, he makes up his mind that he won't let it go anymore.

"A break," he says, for what feels like the hundredth time even if it's only the third. 

Phil is upright now, sat in a hospital chair while Dan lies horizontal on the bed meant for him.

He gives Dan a familiar glare overtop of the game he's playing and Dan accepts it, doesn't let him break the eye contact.

* * *

Phil stumbles around the rooms of their flat. Queasy and sick, denial in every one of his movements. He promises videos, keeps the endless churn of work going right up to the moment he can't do it anymore. 

They wait for test results with baited breath. Dan's chest coiled tight with worry, watching Phil wind himself up and grind himself down in equal measure. 

"Can we talk about it?" he asks, when the results are all clear. “A break?”

Phil is better at avoidance than Dan. When he doesn't want to do something he won't, finds it easy to build up a wall between himself and the outside world until it fizzes away. 

They never go to bed angry, but that's usually down to the way Dan is easy with his feelings. Too rash on occasion, letting it bubble up and over until it spills out everywhere. 

He forces the issue more than Phil, but Phil won't run from a fight. Not if it's necessary. 

“What do you mean?”

"Gamingmas," Dan says. "A no go." 

Phil shares a picture of his brain with the world a few days later and yet Dan still can't understand the way that it works against him. He thinks he can't have things until he's earned them, but he pushes the requirement for worth further and further away until it is almost impossible to reach. 

Until he snaps. Until he can do no more. 

He is all or he is nothing. 

"we're not doing it," Dan repeats, when the subject comes up again.

"We have to." 

"We don't, we don't have to do anything."

Dan can tell how much it hurts him to agree, but he does. 

Just a short series, five days instead of twenty-four. Phil has a pinched look, but he concedes the point.

* * *

The thought occurs to him while editing. Phil gives a final farewell to a series now ten episodes long. A previously agreed end point, one Dan hadn't even had to fight for. That at least, had been in motion for a while.

Things should end before they get stale, while they're still special.

Dan thinks of the way Phil's shoulders are tense these days. How his own body aches when he lays down at night. 

It's been months of constant movement. A year, perhaps. 

In the dark, when he thinks about it, he realises it's been longer than that. 

They've been chasing this thing for a while. Stuck in the rolling, on-going expectation without pause or a break. Never feeling safe, not resting on their laurels, earning it, not taking it for granted. 

But at what expense? 

Phil is rubbing fingers into his own temples. Dan gets caught with the angle of his elbow and they are sat so close he can see how heavy his eyes are with yet another headache. Dan makes the decision.

* * *

"We should take a break." 

Phil looks as though he doesn't want to take his eyes away from whatever it is he's looking at, but he does. 

The room is dark, lit by the glow of their screens and a single lamp.

"Give me five minutes to finish this?" Phil says. 

"No." 

Phil cocks his head, confusion woven in his brow at Dan's flat refusal. 

"I don't mean a break tonight," Dan clarifies. "I mean... an actual break. From work." 

"I don't think..." 

Dan sighs. He's heard the argument, he's agreed with it more times than he can count because it's a good one. He too understands the desire to avoid disappointing anyone, to keep the show running so that no one has to feel sad, but how long before it catches up to them both. 

"You've had a break," Phil continues. "You took the year off your channel to do the rest of it." 

He knows that isn't meant to hurt. He knows that Phil isn't angry, or pointing out what could look like his laziness. There is no power struggle here, no unequal workloads. It's mutual, always mutual, but it stings him a little anyway.

"You need a break too." 

"I'm fine."

Dan regrets sitting on the opposite couch. He wants to move closer, to touch Phil in some way just to reinforce the connection. He doesn't, mostly because it's probably just his own internal dramatics that are giving him the urge, but also because after nearly ten years he doesn't need to be touching him for Phil to feel the intention.

"Just... We could reset. Think about what it is we want to do."

"Aren't you happy?" 

"Are you?" 

Phil's teeth come down on his bottom lip, and whatever was on his screen is abandoned in favour of turning towards Dan, one leg hitched up on the couch. 

"It's not something I need from you," Dan says, before Phil can respond. "It isn't one of those things where I'm in crisis. I'm not drowning in it, and if you want to continue forever you know I'd follow you... I'm just not sure this is _it_ anymore."

"Isn't it?"

"There could be more, couldn't there? We've talk about it. Don't act like we haven't talked about it." 

"I'm not," Phil shrugs, easily. His shoulders look a little lighter, moving smoothly, knots untied. "I'm just trying to... get my head around it." 

"Just a pause. A rest to recharge our batteries. Find out what next year means for us." 

"From everything?" 

Dan shakes his head. "Not everything. I still want to... I said I was taking the year off, letting the pressure stop a bit for my channel. I've taken the year, I want to come up with... something. Authentic, or whatever."

"So some of the other stuff?" 

"You remember after last time? You remember we said life stuff and YouTube. Slower, less... crazy." 

"Hm." 

"We did that. We did some life stuff and we ramped up gaming again and everything... but we didn't take the pressure off. We didn't. We just pushed more stuff, worked more hours. _You_ worked more hours." Dan's hands are braced on the sofa, they ache. He hadn't realised how scared he'd been to start this conversation, like he is admitting defeat. "I don't regret any of it. We talked about it, I agreed."

"So you still want to do your channel, all of that." 

"Yes."

"Alright. So what did you want a break from, exactly? We don't have any projects lined up, or anything big after the DVD is released and all of that has died down." 

Dan watches the flutter of stress in the corners of Phil's mouth. The release hasn't gone as smoothly as they thought, one issue after another and Phil has been out there, putting out fires with very little concern for himself. Tense phone calls with Martyn followed by email after email and decision after decision. It's overwhelming. 

"Hear me out," Dan says, as precursor, so that Phil knows that Dan understands how big of a deal what he's about to say is. 

"What?"

"I was thinking of a break from the gaming channel." 

"Are you kidding?" 

"No." Dan repositions too, still wishing he was over on the other couch with some tactile way to communicate, but he's here, and changing it would only make the sense of foreboding even stronger. "Listen. We wind up Dan versus Phil, the board is full anyway. We use Dilmas to wind up the Sims and then we just... reset. Take a breath."

"A breath?" 

"A moment to decide." 

"For how long?" 

Dan shrugs. Phil hasn't moved or gotten mad, or reacted in any way that could be construed as bad, so his own shoulders feel a little lighter in a way that makes him realise just how wound up they were. 

"I didn't have a fixed amount of time in mind."

"What if we take a breath and decide we want to come back in a week." 

"Then that's what we decide." 

Phil lifts a hand to his mouth and taps a finger against his bottom lip. "And what if we decide not to come back?" 

Dan does move then, because it's senseless to stay over here when he wants to be over there. He's sick of making himself do things because he thinks it's what he _should_ be doing. Authentic, his truth. And that means sitting down next to Phil and taking his hand, skin to skin reassurance. 

"Then that's what we decide," he repeats, emphasising it.

Phil deflates. The breath rushes out of him quick and he folds inwards, under Dan's arm so his head is right above Dan's heartbeat. 

"People are going to be so..."

"I know," Dan nods, his chin tickled by the fragrant strands of Phil's hair. 

He feels it keenly. He can't bear the thought of disappointing everyone, of causing them the kind of distress that it might, but they can't carry on like this. 

There needs to be a fresh start, a new era. They've closed the door on so many things before, and it always led to bigger, better things. this time will be no different. 

"It's not a life thing," Dan says, in case that is what Phil is worried about. "If anything it gives us room to..."

He trails off, because that might be an entirely different conversation. One he doesn't need to have now if Phil doesn't want to have it. If it's too much. 

It is all woven together, their job and their life and how they intertwine. Phil knows that just as much as him, but he needs Phil to know that he isn't pausing _them_. If anything, exactly the opposite. 

"A break," Phil says. "A breath." 

Dan nods, and thought Phil can't see him where his face is buried in the front of Dan's jumper, he knows he can feel it. 

"Okay."

* * *

Dan lets Phil steer it from there, because he sometimes does better when it's something he can plan. Dan's therapist tells him he needs to learn to let go, to work with the idea of not knowing, get comfortable with ambiguity, and he's trying to do that. Maybe it's cheating, because he isn't really without a plan, Phil is there to catch him at all times. In all ways. 

"I might change the set," Phil says over dinner. 

Like something timid and easily startled, Dan approaches it with caution, keeping surprise off his face with laser-like focus. 

"Yeah?"

"We wouldn't need downstairs," Phil says. 

Dan knows what he's saying, can follow the thread of that thought through to its conclusion, and he wonders whether the time has come to have that conversation after all. 

"Not a life thing," Dan reminds him. 

"Not really," Phil says. "Not yet. Just..." 

"I get it," Dan says, because he does. 

Phil doesn't bring it up again.

* * *

"We're really doing this," Phil says, turning the camera off on video number five. 

"Yes."

Phil looks at him, or just a little to the left of him over his shoulder, as if somewhere in the middle distant he is contemplating something. 

He nods, mostly to himself, but he does bring his eyes back to meet Dan's.

* * *

"It's not a life thing," Dan repeats into the webcam. 

He catches sight of their faces moving on the screen. He watches wide smile after wide smile on Phil's face. The slope of loose shoulders, the free way he moves as if finally, finally able to breathe. 

It rises in him then, the hope of it all. The promise of not knowing. The future, as they have said, is unclear. He looks over at Phil, who looks like the rest of his life in a bad coat and an easy smile.

Today it's telling the world he's joining Phil for Christmas, tomorrow it could be anything else at all. 

A break. A breath. Who knows what comes next?

 

Dan can't wait to find out.

**Author's Note:**

> Come say hi on [Tumblr](http://jestbee.tumblr.com)


End file.
